INFO 4307 Final Project - Canvas and the 21st Century Student
CANVAS and the 21st Century Student Jennifer Gibson INFO 4307: Knowledge Management Tools and Technologies Dr. Tereza Merlo, Ph.D December 7, 2019 Abstract CANVAS is an online learning management system that personifies the ideal knowledge management system by addressing each component of an effective KM tool. The six aspects of KM -- Strategy, Organizational Culture, Organizational Processes, Management and Leadership, Technology, and Politics -- all factor into the selection and use of CANVAS. Each portion of CANVAS, from the viewpoint of the professor who enters the coursework parameters, to the students who utilize it on a daily basis, find that CANVAS is a flexible and robust system with many features that can be added based on academic needs. Keywords: Canvas, knowledge management, university, students, educators, collaboration, academia, ease-of-use, technology Introduction Knowledge Management tools and technologies are an ever-evolving set of applications and programs designed to address “all phases involved in capturing, coding, sharing, disseminating, applying, and reusing knowledge”. They comprise a varied list of ways to take information, transform it into useable, sharable knowledge and finding the best way to ensure that knowledge is the most up-to-date and profitable it can be. In the case of this paper, profitable means value to the universities, students, and professors utilizing the knowledge management resources found in CANVAS. CANVAS is a learning module system by Instructure and, since its release in 2011, has rapidly grown in use and adoption in the United States. “Nearly 80% of new LMS contracts in U.S. and Canadian higher education result in a move to Canvas” . The integration of many flexible tools such as group discussions, collaborations through GoogleDocs or Officer365, scheduling features, and streamlined course modules are helping to propel CANVAS into universities across the country. History When I first started back to college in 2015, I chose the online courses at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). The system used for all online students was Blackboard, another learning management system. Blackboard worked well enough as a very streamlined way to receive and turn in assignments, have group discussions, and contact school staff, but that was where its flexibility ended. One key element of any good knowledge management tool such as a learning management system is the ability to make the user feel both comfortable and empowered by what they are learning. The system should be seamless, easy-to-maneuver, and intuitive in ways that are familiar with other knowledge repositories or shared systems. Blackboard failed on this for me because I rarely felt confident in my abilities to navigate through my courses using sidebars or links provided by the system. They were not intuitive and oftentimes, information such as assignments, notes, and grades were lost. CANVAS, on the other hand, is a smooth, completely intuitive, and customizable tool that helps students and educators keep track of what is going on in classes with real time information. An example of this is the calendar function. Once you are set up with your classes, the calendar pulls due dates from the instructors and with the click of a button, you can see what is due when and, better yet, if you’ve already turned in an assignment, it shows up in the calendar as strikethrough text to let you know you’ve already finished it. KM Tenet - Strategy The first key factor for an effective knowledge management tool is Strategy, which says “the objective is to manage, share, and create relevant knowledge assets that will help meet tactical and strategic requirements” . CANVAS achieves this through defined, consistent sidebars of links that remain the same from class to class. The content of each class might change and the professor might choose to use the links differently or not at all, but the student can always count on the exact same hotlinks being there. The first sidebar is the student bar which has your institution, name, image, and five clickable links that help you navigate the site. Here, the student can access everything from a snapshot of their classes with Dashboard, to the Calendar, and an Inbox for communicating with course professors and other students. The Dashboard is the springboard for the bulk of the work the educators and students put into Canvas. This important sidebar for each class, features links for home, announcements, assignments, discussions, grades, and collaborations among others. These links are the first steps in knowledge sharing and dissemination where knowledge flows from the educator to the student via prepared modules and units and class discussions. CANVAS allows the educator to create learning modules one time and then reuse them from semester to semester without the need for total re-creation each time. Updating course materials is easy as new knowledge is gained and technologies change. These changes are seamlessly integrated into the student experience simply by the click of a button. This type of flexible and easy-to-update knowledge sharing assists in the strategic goals for the University of educating its students with the most pertinent knowledge available on a per course basis. KM Tenet - Organizational Culture The next cornerstone in a workable knowledge management system is Organizational Culture, “which influences the way people interact” , and the challenges faced. In CANVAS, the largest way I’ve interacted with fellow students and my professors has been the discussion boards. Almost every class has a requirement for a weekly post and reply on that week’s topic of study. This particular knowledge management tool falls under the sharing and collaboration label, as each user posts a factual, researched piece on the topic then invites responses from their fellow students. The challenges here are what I think you would normally find in any sort of social sharing environment such as Twitter or Facebook – sometimes people feel a certain anonymity behind the keyboard and do not always use good judgement in their replies, especially when disagreements happen. Student/professor interactions happen within the private realm of inboxes and email, so it’s pretty standard fare and much less likely to have any “flaming” aspects such as disrespecting either person. In this instance, anonymity is not actual available as both parties know the other because the relationship is more personal and one-to-one. Another challenge relating to organizational culture is the ability of the professors to import or use coursework that is third-party generated. A cornerstone of this KM tool is the way knowledge is shared. Sometimes, when a professor uses coursework or problems from another supplier, “they often will be forced to purchase access to the publishers’ proprietary website and LMS” . This can cause issues with inaccurate or incomplete coursework, extra work for the instructor to manually enter the information, or choosing not to utilize the coursework in favor of more outdated materials. I have had this happen with a computer course I took at SNHU. The materials on information technology security were often dated from the early 2000’s, meaning they were horribly out of date. I suspect the reason for this was because the instructor did not want to enter the updated information because it came from a third party source. The professor never responded to any queries we made, both in private emails, and even on the public discussion boards – which is one of the places that manners and netiquette seemed to disappear. This kind of attitude can seriously damage the chances of success for the students, and in some ways, the university as well, if the processes and the applications are not utilized to the best extent and knowledge isn’t properly shared or updated. KM Tenet - Organizational Processes This aspect dovetails with culture perfectly because it relates to the need for the right processes and environments in order to maintain a successful knowledge management program. CANVAS, as discussed, features a wide array of intuitive features to allow students and educators ease of maneuverability through the system. One of these is the collaboration link which leads to a link to either GoogleDocs or Office365. This allows groups to work on a shared project without the need for attaching documents to emails or missing out on the latest updated file. This can be a huge benefit to students because of its stability and the ability for notes to be transcribed right in the document for all participants to see. Because this is an environment for only the students, it’s a safe haven for brainstorming, writing, rewriting, and collaborating without the authority of the professor looming over the students. The ease of the collaboration feature is definitely a highlight of the CANVAS program. Modules is another important aspect of CANVAS. This, ideally, is where the instructor will upload all of the coursework for the semester. This particular feature is very flexible for the professor in that they can schedule when each unit is visible to the students. For the student, the preview link of the units can also show when it will be available and how many points that particular unit is in relation to their grades. In conjunction with the Assignments tab as well as the syllabus, the Modules tab is very helpful for students when putting together their study schedule. I’ve had instructors who’ve held to a rigorous schedule, opening modules only one a week and I’ve had some where the entire course has been opened on day one. Personally, I prefer the week by week version as it helps me stay focused and organized and I’m able to follow the coursework in a logical manner instead of having the opportunity to skip ahead and pick up knowledge that is not yet pertinent or able to be understood. A newer aspect of CANVAS’ environment is the accessibility towards ensuring challenged students are geared to succeed. “Canvas integrates well with products to assist the disabled, such as screen readers and video closed captioning” . This makes the product much more tempting to universities who are all about diversity and equal opportunity. Once more, this shows CANVAS’ ability to provide a good knowledge sharing environment for all students. KM Tenet - Management and Leadership Though one wouldn’t necessarily think of CANVAS as needing to be subjected rigorously to management and leadership, in the context of Knowledge Management, having competent and experienced educators and leadership who are on-board with the CANVAS program, is paramount. In a tree-structure, the top leadership and management here would obviously be the board of regents and their subsidiary departments who investigate the use of a learning management system. When I first started at UNT, we used Blackboard, and I was not a fan. It was not user friendly and it seemed to have more glitches than benefits. The leadership teams who reached out to even explore the idea of changing over to CANVAS is to be commended for realizing the current (Blackboard) system was not an effective tool, either as a learning management system, or a knowledge management tool. The next level of leadership would come from the scholar departments and chairs who set out the coursework for each professor. Then, the professors themselves, who guide the students through the coursework that is uploaded to the system. On the CANVAS website, they tout the ease of course material upload and integration and re-use. I don’t know if this is true but almost all the courses I’ve had through CANVAS have been extremely well laid out and detailed and the issues I have had, I’ve noted with each professor and hope they will be examined before the next group of students goes through the course. Lastly, and something that I have not really taken advantage of, are the Librarians. To be honest, until I did the research for this paper, I didn’t even know CANVAS offered the option for an embedded librarian to assist students much as a traditional on-campus librarian would do. Except in this learning management system, the impact and influence is much greater as an embedded librarian refers “to a method of delivering information literacy instruction and library resources in LMS courses, directly to students, in collaboration with faculty”. As I don’t actually know if UNT’s version of CANVAS offers this feature, I can’t speak to its effectiveness, but I can say that I would actually use the heck out of it. Librarians know everything and they know how to lead students through good research habits. This particular function, to me, is one of the ultimate expressions of Knowledge Management – knowledge acquisition, knowledge sharing, and knowledge creation and codification based on the new knowledge that has been learned and documented. KM Tenet - Technology For an effective knowledge management system to work, the technologies, tools, and systems used in it must be continually evaluated and updated. This would include staying on top of server needs, bandwidth usage, and web hosting. Vigilant maintenance is necessary because of the amount of users on the network and system. Because CANVAS is so dependent on the upload function for assignments, files from professors, quizzes, and projects, ensuring enough server space is available is one of the most vital non-program components. Ease-of-use is one of the cornerstones of Instructure’s marketing for CANVAS. It’s touted as being easy to program for instructors and easy to navigate for students and they are not wrong on most accounts. As with any program, CANVAS does have some technological issues that need to be addressed such as the docx file type upload only. While Microsoft Word is the predominant word processing unit in use by students and a subscription is available at a discount through UNT, not every university that uses CANVAS offers that option. OpenOffice, at one time, allowed users to save files as .doc files, but since Word changed to .docx, I don’t believe that’s possible anymore, which means when an assignment is due, the student who does not have access to Word, must use the cut and paste feature. This very viable option has the minor drawback of a student not being quite as diligent in proofreading before they hit submit and sometimes leaving out pertinent parts, usually beginnings or endings to pages and discussion posts, or, more often, bibliographies. It would be nice if all text editor files were able to be uploaded. At Bowling Green State University, they conducted a research survey to see if CANVAS was felt by the student body to be a usable system. While the survey pool was very small, only 13 students, their tasks were relatively robust and provided administrators with the result that “Canvas is highly usable, but does have some room for improvement” . I think that is a pretty expected result. One thing I believe could be improved upon or perhaps added are the reporting functions of CANVAS to administrators. The SPOT evaluations we as students do are serviceable, though I wonder at their validity because bitter students with grades that reflect their lack of effort could easily give bad evaluations for those classes. In CANVAS, I feel like the students, as well as the professors, need a course evaluation of the materials presented. Someplace, even during the semester, that we could denote a particular section is not working (such as a busted link), the material is out of date (especially vital to information technology classes), and ideas for improving the materials provided (such as ensuring classes that rely on auditory input actually have audio clips embedded in the coursework). This is more than just informing the professor because they have a lot of things to be doing such as grading tests, homework, etc. This kind of feedback would be generated for those who oversee the construction of the coursework, aside from the professors. KM Tenet - Politics A university is rife with political shenanigans, especially in Texas where football is the end-all, be-all. This could make it difficult to find “long term support to implement and sustain inititiatives that involve virtually all organizational functions”. Fortunately, as UNT did make the move recently to CANVAS, I believe the administration will continue to work with the educators and students to make it a viable and user-friendly system. Other long-term support must obviously come from the university’s IT department as they strive to keep the site maintained and running smoothly. Money spent on upgrades and added functionality such as the embedded librarian feature, would do the program a world of good. This decision, however, can only come from the University board, so I hope they continue to view CANVAS as the excellent knowledge management tool that it is and continue to support it by allocating and even increasing funding for its growth. Conclusion Is CANVAS, touted as a learning management system, really a flexible and robust knowledge management system? Yes. CANVAS deftly integrates every aspect of knowledge management in a seamless, easy-to-use program. There is no component of KM that CANVAS does not fulfill. Knowledge creation and sharing, collaboration, acquisition, content management, and application are all represented in some fashion within the framework of the CANVAS program. It is an excellent first step into the world of Knowledge Management for users who seek to continually grow and share their knowledge. = References = Baldwin, S. &.-H. (2019, July). Online Course Design: A Review of the Canvas Course Evaluation Checklist. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, pp. 268-282. Dalkir, K. (2017). Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press. Faisant, J. &. (2017). Can They Use It? Studying the Usability of Canvas LMS at Bowling Green State University. The Ohio Journal of Science, p. A21. Introducing Knowledge Management. (2019). Retrieved from Knowledge Management Tools: http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/ Kruger, D. &. (2015). 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